Several doctoral students from the NDSU transportation and logistics program presented their research at the North Dakota GIS Users Conference in Grand Forks in September. The students were among the nearly 200 attendees representing higher education, utilities, businesses, local, state and federal agencies and other organizations.

Sumadhur Shakya presented “Impact of Disruptive Change in North American Supply Chain of Nitrogen Fertilizers.” Shakya examined how changing cropping patterns and new domestic sources of natural gas may influence flows of fertilizer in the United States. Shakya also is a spatial transportation analyst with the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute.

Poyraz Kayabas presented “An analysis of Driver Residence Proximity to Crash Event.” The results show that majority of injury crashes occurred in close proximity to driver residence. However, there was evidence for differences in crash distance by driver categories. Kimberly Vachal, advanced research fellow at the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, was a co-writer.

Zijian Zheng presented “Development of GIS Multimodal Capacity Model for a Northern Tier Freight Corridor.” The research visualizes corridor capacity with highway and railway transportation in the region. Eunsu Lee, associate research fellow at the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute was a co-writer.

Yasaman Kazemi and Chijioke Ifepe presented “Fixing Topological Errors in the North Dakota Road Network.” The study investigates the approach and solutions to fix the topology errors in NDSU’s current statewide road network model.

Additional doctoral students attending the conference were Christopher DeHaan and Luke Holt. Holt also is a transportation research planning analyst with the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute.

NDSU is recognized as one of the nation’s top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.